US gov’t threatened Yahoo with $250K daily fine if it didn’t use PRISM

Yahoo fought against helping with warrantless surveillance in 2007 but lost.

by Joe Mullin - Sept 11 2014, 5:58pm EST

Yahoo reports that it is on the verge of releasing 1,500 pages of documents related to a long court battle over its participation in the PRISM program, a National Security Agency program revealed last summer as part of the Snowden leaks.

A leaked top-secret slide about PRISM shows that Yahoo was one of the first participants, having begun contributing to the database in March of 2008. It did so under severe duress. Company executives believed the government's demand for data was "unconstitutional and overbroad" and fought it in court.